Given these realities, leading a worldwide coalition against the two great Eurasian revanchist powers — Russia, which seeks to annex Ukraine, and China, which seeks to annex Taiwan — requires the sort of pragmatic vision that Secretary of State James Baker employed when organizing 35 nations, including autocracies, to stand against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Baker’s strategy was not to change the world, but to undo a particular territorial conquest. The Biden administration’s strategy toward Russia and China should be likewise: oriented not to fight autocracy the world over, but to stop the armed aggression of two military powers.

The march of democracy should play an important but not primary role in U.S. foreign policy. To believe in the End of History is to believe that the experience of the West has more purchase in places like the Middle East and Africa than the local experiences, histories and traditions of those places themselves. And that is a conceit. Fukuyama, who has produced a two-volume survey of political order around the world, is a great philosopher and political scientist who rightly believes in historic liberalism as the ideal all countries should seek. But they should seek it in their own particular way.

Even in this age of globalization, where singular ideas can race across continents, the world is still too varied and complex a place for one lofty idea to prosper simply because an autocrat’s tanks are now stalled outside Kyiv.